The Orange Prize for Fiction is the UK’s largest literary award for a single novel. The main criteria is that the novel is by a woman writing in English and published in Britain the year the prize is awarded. The Orange Prize aims to celebrate novels of excellence, originality and accessibility while promoting women writers to as wide a range of male and female readers as possible.

I recently read the 2007 award winner. The author is Chimamandia Ngozi Adiche. The book is Half a Yellow Sun. It is set during Biafra’s passionate struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960’s – and the violent aftermath. Through her compassionate and masterful writing, Adiche reveals her natural gift for storytelling and deftly illustrates how war can destroy a blossoming country’s potential. Epic and ambitious, Half a Yellow Sun offers a remarkable commentary on moral and social responsibility that transcends time and space while delivering a searing history lesson that documents the fierce hope and the devastating disappointment of this seminal moment in African history.